Learn with YESEO
Master search engine optimization right inside Slack with YESEO. Watch tutorials, follow step-by-step guides, and understand the SEO principles that drive real traffic to your newsroom.
Install in 4 steps
Install YESEO in your Slack workspace and start getting SEO insights in seconds.
Install YESEO
Add YESEO to your Slack workspace in one click. No signup, no credit card, no login required — completely free.
Paste Your Story
Use /prep for unpublished stories or /analyze on existing URLs. Paste your draft or link it directly.
Add Location Context
Tell YESEO your target audience's region so it pulls relevant Google Trends data for your community.
Get Your SEO Report
Receive keyword insights, trending topics, and AI-powered headline suggestions — all inside Slack.
Ryan Restivo's RJI Fellowship journey
Every feature in YESEO traces back to Ryan's 2022-2023 fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Below is the full timeline — each box a complete chapter with article summaries and linked sources.
Accepted into the 2022-2023 Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellowship Program
Ryan Restivo joins the RJI fellowship alongside seven other media innovators. The program, run by the Missouri School of Journalism, funds hands-on research into emerging technologies that can help newsrooms serve their communities better. At this point, SEO research was something Ryan had been doing independently — analyzing 60,000+ headlines to find patterns — but the fellowship gives him structured time and institutional support to turn that analysis into a real tool.
The Core Question: How Can Newsrooms Access SEO Insights Without Expensive Enterprise Tools?
Ryan begins the fellowship with a clear problem statement: small and mid-sized newsrooms can't afford paid SEO platforms like Ahrefs or SEMrush. At the same time, SEO research from the Knight Center at UT Austin and The Conversation U.S. shows that headlines are the single most important ranking factor a journalist controls. Ryan prototypes a Slack-based tool during his RJI Fellowship that delivers keyword research directly to newsrooms where they already work — no expensive dashboards needed.
Deep Dive: Core Web Vitals — Because Keywords Alone Don't Rank
While refining his prototype, Ryan learns that even the best headline won't rank if the page loads too slowly or has poor mobile usability. This becomes the second pillar of YESEO's SEO foundation — integrating Core Web Vitals assessment alongside keyword research. The technical signals Google uses to evaluate page quality matter just as much as the words in a headline, and both need to be accessible without expensive tools.
Headlines Are the Single Most Important Factor a Journalist Controls
RJI research confirms what Ryan suspected from analyzing 60,000+ headlines: headlines matter most. Joel Abrams from The Conversation U.S. writes that a bad headline means almost nobody reads the work, regardless of its quality. Ryan makes headlines the foundation of YESEO's design philosophy — everything serves the headline. The tool's entire workflow is built around helping journalists craft and optimize headlines with data-driven confidence.
Making SEO Data Accessible to Journalists of All Technical Levels
A critical UX challenge emerges during the fellowship: making sophisticated SEO data accessible to reporters and editors who have never used an SEO tool. Ryan designs the tool with progressive disclosure — simple at first, advanced when needed. The key insight is that journalists don't need to understand SEO theory to use it well. The most important feature becomes the /popular command, which surfaces trending terms across all users with zero setup.
Pre-Publish Analysis — Catching Optimization Opportunities Before Launch
Realizing most SEO work happens before publication, Ryan adds pre-publish analysis via the /prep command. Newsrooms can now evaluate headline and keyword strategy on drafts before the story goes live. This is a pivotal moment: by focusing on pre-publish work, YESEO positions itself as an editorial planning tool rather than a post-publication fixer.
Combining Audience Data with Editorial Judgment
Testing the prototype across beats and formats reveals a pattern that shapes YESEO's future: the best SEO insights come from combining audience data with editorial judgment — not replacing either one. Ryan refines the tool to augment journalistic expertise. The GPT headline feature emerges from this insight: it provides suggestions, not decisions. Ryan's philosophy becomes clear — data-informed, not data-driven.
Respecting Newsroom Privacy — Editors Have Sensitive Topics
As the tool gains traction among newsrooms, Ryan realizes that privacy is not optional. Newsrooms discuss breaking stories and sensitive editorial decisions in their Slack channels daily. The tool must provide SEO insights without exposing sensitive editorial questions or internal workflows to third parties. This becomes a core design principle: YESEO never stores or shares newsroom data.
The Fellowship Culminates: YESEO Goes Public
The fellowship culminates in the public launch of YESEO — built from SEO research, tested across 15+ newsrooms, and designed from first principles to help journalists do their best work. The first RJI training event happens on April 16, 2023, at WSB TV in Atlanta. By year's end, YESEO has been used across 500+ newsrooms worldwide and has become a 2024 Online Journalism Awards finalist for Excellence in AI Innovation.
Watch & learn
Watch real walkthroughs of every YESEO command — /analyze, /prep, /popular, and /lookup. Press play and follow along at your own pace.
Use YESEO to get Insights
See how to use the /analyze command to pull Google Trends data and keyword insights for your story.
Deep Dive: /analyze Command Walkthrough
A step-by-step walkthrough of running /analyze on a live article URL and interpreting the results.
Pre-Publication SEO with /prep
Learn how /prep helps you identify the strongest SEO keywords before your story goes live.
YESEO in Action: Full Demo
Watch a complete walkthrough of YESEO from installation through generating your first report.
What RJI fellows & newsroom pros have learned
Every story can rank better — but the research is clear: the biggest levers a journalist controls are in the headline and the keywords. Here are the four core principles driving YESEO, drawn from RJI research and interviews with SEO leaders at newsrooms including The Conversation, Axios, Hearst, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Headlines Matter Most
Your headline is the #1 ranking factor. Research from across journalism consistently shows this: the headline is the single most important factor a journalist controls for search visibility. Every SEO test, study, and audience analysis confirms that headline quality directly correlates with search traffic volume.
""This is the single most important thing you can do to make sure that your work is read. You're putting a lot of work into creating this article, and if it has a bad headline on it, almost nobody is going to read it.""
""Headlines, like SEO heads in particular, [are] probably the thing that a journalist has the most control over and can make an impact.""
Location Is Everything
SEO isn't just about keywords — it's about WHERE those keywords are trending. Local context turns generic keyword data into editorial gold. By putting place at the center of trends, news teams can surface keyword research for specific community stories that enterprise tools miss entirely.
""By putting place at the center of the trends, users can get better data. This means you could get keyword research into a story about Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman in the Philadelphia market, if you were the Philadelphia Inquirer, just as strongly as you could get trends breaking down the keyword Tigers in Columbia, Missouri.""
Use What's Trending
The /popular command shows top trending terms across all YESEO users. This community intelligence reveals what other newsrooms are covering right now — giving you a real-time window into trending topics across the industry without running separate research tools.
""We report on companies I've never heard of and regions I've never been to — I find it really useful just for getting a rough place to start on a headline or a deck.""
Research Your Competitors
Use /lookup to find every story in your community covering the same beat. Understanding what has already been covered and how those stories are positioned helps you find the gap — the underserved angle that your team can own.
""Headlines are so important, and we can always be working even harder to get them right for search and the reader. I know my newsroom wants to hit best SEO practices; I also know they may need audience team support to do that in real time.""
Everything you need to know
Click each topic below for step-by-step instructions with video walkthroughs.
First, go to the Slack App Directory to install the bot.
You may need to be an admin or an owner of your Slack workspace to fully install it. It depends on your workspace settings of who can install apps in your workspace.
Make sure that "Only allow apps from the Slack App Directory" is turned Off in your App Management Settings (found at workspace-name.slack.com/apps/manage/settings) since YESEO is not yet in the Slack App Directory.
Will give you Google Trends data by keyword/location for your news story.
- Input a URL after
/analyzeand hit Enter. - Input a US City, US State or Country to receive Google Trends data for your community.
- If there is more than one possibility — such as Georgia (the US state) and Georgia (the country) — the tool will ask you to specify the area.
- Hit Enter. When your report is ready you will get a green button to access the report.
- Click on Explore Keywords — a drop down will show all relevant keywords to the story that the bot has found. From those keywords, you can see what Google Trends data is available for each one.
For stories that have yet to be published. Get keyword suggestions for your headline or subhead.
If you have a story where you want to know the main keywords to include in your headline or subhead, enter the command: /prep
A text input box will pop up for you to paste in the story (approximately 500 words maximum) and hit Enter.
Again, it will ask you the specific location to make sure the data is relevant to your story. The resulting report will suggest keyword targeting for your story SEO, and allows you to explore those keywords in Google Trends data.
See what topics or keywords are being most commonly found with this bot by everyone using it.
/popular pulls down the top 10 keywords that have been mentioned in the last week. This allows data from others to be accessible to you — all you have to do is use /popular.
This will produce a list of those top terms with options to explore the data further.
Finds stories specific to the keyword or term that you enter.
Enter a keyword or term (like "Southwest Airlines") and the tool will return all the current stories that include that phrase in their SEO.
This helps you find all the stories about a specific topic or breaking news event in your community — understand what's already out there and where your angle might be.
Experimental Feature
In the /analyze and /prep reports, you will see a Large Language Model headline suggestion solution.
This feeds the text of your story into a Large Language Model that produces five SEO-friendly headline suggestions. Use these as inspiration — your organization's style guide may require adjustments, but they can provide great starting points for crafting your headline.
Ready to get started?
Add YESEO to your Slack workspace for free and start optimizing your stories today.
